ANOTHER FLESH
Philip Callow
Allison & Busby 1968-71 £5.99
ISBN 978-0749000059
Omnibus Edition comprising
Going to the Moon 1968
The Bliss Body 1969
Flesh of Morning 1971
"There is plenty in the trilogy to prove Mr Callow's abundant talent beyond any doubting... Philip Callow's increasingly confident and skilful trilogy of novels about a young boy growing up in the postwar Midlands; questing for his identity, drifting, loving and losing, then finally coming to terms with his sexual nature in a successful affair ... An authentic and moving chronicle of a life" (TLS).
"I have seldom read a book in which adolescent sexuality is better dealt with" (Martin Seymour-Smith).
"Contains scenes and characters that are blazingly direct and intimate and fierce" (The Times).
"A born writer, every one of whose paragraphs is shaped with conscious artistry" (Francis King).
"Our only writer to have confidently picked up the flickering torch of D. H. Lawrence" (The Observer).
"Callow's writing is like nothing but itself, tense, uneasy, never elegant, sometimes with a clean lift as if the words had not been used before, never without its own nervous integrity" (Angela Carter, Guardian).
"What a fine novelist he is" (Robert Nye).
"He is one of the few contemporary novelists who after flowering at the first reading, bear fruit at the second" (Ray Gosling).
"His prose is clear and easy and elegant, his observation sharp but kind and never superficial" (V.S. Naipaul).
"The passionate recorder of provincial Bohemia" (Anthony Thwaite).
"Callow is a writer who feels life, smells it, eats and drinks it, draws it up through the soles of his feet" (John Wain).
"Such remarkable artistry and sensitivity" (Daily Telegraph).
"One of the most securely lyrical novels of working class life since Henry Green's Living... written in a prose which seems to move with a spontaneity so convincing that you feel it must be telling the truth, and yet has eloquence and lyric intensity and fidelity to the idioms people actually use" (Stephen Wall, The Observer).
"Mr Callow's writing, reminiscent of Alan Sillitoe at his finest and most controlled, reaffirms that there is some mysterious source of talent peculiar to the Midlands... His poetic images are precise, sometimes startlingly beautiful" (Sunday Telegraph).
Blurbs from the 1989 Omnibus Edition
Obituary from The Independent Thursday, 27 September 2007
Kenneth Philip Callow, writer: born Birmingham 26 October 1924; FRSL 2000; three times married (one daughter), third 1987 Anne Golby; died 22 September 2007.
Philip Callow was a poet, a biographer and the author of 16 novels, many of them highly acclaimed. Most of his work was autobiographical, so his principal subjects were adolescence, working-class life, the artistic life and depression.
He was born in Birmingham and trained as an engineer in Coventry. After the Second World War, from which he was exempted from service because of his work as a toolmaker, he went to Nottingham in pursuit of a woman artist with whom he had corresponded. Their relationship didn't work out, but during this period Philip met his first wife and found the material for his first novel, The Hosanna Man, published by Cape in 1956.
This remarkable novel's portrait of working-class Bohemians in the poor Hyson Green area of the city is a unique document of the era. Callow's crisp, poetic prose, combined with a strong narrative and vivid characterisation, made a powerful and original début that gained him a reputation as a proletarian novelist. He covered some of the same territory as Stanley Middleton and Alan Sillitoe, arriving two years ahead of both, but stylistically his biggest debt was to D.H. Lawrence.
The Hosanna Man was very well reviewed. His contemporary John Wain, author of Hurry On Down (1953), wrote: "He may do great things... his characters affect us in the same untidy, rich way as people we meet in real life". Callow seemed set to escape his job as a clerk (which his fictional alter ego takes up towards the end of the novel) into the literary life. Then disaster struck. A Nottingham bookseller claimed that Thompson, a character in the novel, was based on him, and threatened to sue. Callow's portrait of Thompson was detailed: he is a creepy, ambiguous figure who mixes with the aspirant artist and writers who Louis (the Callow figure) has befriended. The passage that caused the biggest problem comes when Thompson is shown a painting by Jack Kelvin, a friend of Louis's.
"I see you've put in the pubic hairs. Good for you."
"Why not?" Kelvin asked in genuine astonishment.
Thompson faltered a moment, then grinned. But I noticed a different look creep over his face. I thought, "I wondered if he expected a different answer, and now he's not certain of his ground?"
Again he pointed with his stick. "That would go down well with my pornographic clients," he said, looking fixedly at the painting. "I could keep it in a back room with a curtain over it, couldn't I?"
I looked at him sharply, thinking he must be joking. Kelvin gave a snort of derisive laughter. "For the special customers – that the idea?" he said. I knew he was angry.
"Yes."
It's convincingly edgy and doesn't make clear whether Thompson really has a sideline in pornography or merely a slimy, mistimed sense of humour. Nevertheless, the passage did for the book. At the time, Callow claimed that any similarities were coincidental. In later years he was reluctant to discuss the incident and confessed to having been very naive. Thompson was, it seems certain, based on a real person who, unsurprisingly, felt aggrieved. Cape was not willing to fight a libel case; it withdrew the novel and pulped all remaining copies. The incident, coming so early in his career, gave Callow a deep scar and set him back in a way from which, many feel, he never entirely recovered.
His second novel, Common People (1958), saw him move to Heinemann. Quieter but equally autobiographical, it was described by J.B. Priestley as "done beautifully, with fine economy" and chosen by John Betjeman as one of his books of the year in the Sunday Times: "His book sounds like a genuine cry from a class usually silent in the literary world." In 1995, Jarvis Cocker borrowed the title for Pulp's most popular song, the lyrics of which (probably coincidentally) cover very Callow-like territory.
He had now mined much of his life and his third novel, A Pledge For The Earth (1960), his first written in the third person, was less successful. In 1966, an Arts Council grant enabled him to leave clerking in Plymouth and become a full-time writer.
There followed the trilogy that began with Going To The Moon (1968), which is regarded by D.J. Taylor and others as his finest work. All three novels were published in an omnibus (Another Flesh) in 1989, to coincide with his first novel after a 10-year absence, the fine The Painter's Confessions. "I always seem to need to have a painter in a novel", he wrote in 1991. The novel's narrator is described as having "a flaw, a split".
When I wanted to indulge and excuse myself I saw it as a wound. From it came my work... my disability was being put to good use by some inner agent, working day and night and with no more scruples than a gangster.
He published three further novels, but the inspiration, and the attention, was drying up. In the 1970s, at the suggestion of his agent, he began writing biographies of the figures he admired most, beginning with his hero, Lawrence (Son and Lover in 1975 was followed 28 years later by Body of Truth), continuing with Van Gogh, Walt Whitman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Cézanne and Chekhov. These were very readable biographies – better than the "cut and paste things" he described them as, but researched entirely from home, with no use of primary sources. They brought in much-needed money.
Callow trained as a teacher in the late 1960s. He never taught in schools, not having the temperament, but did teach creative writing for some years at Sheffield City Polytechnic and elsewhere. In the early 1980s he gave an Arvon Foundation course with the novelist Sta nley Middleton, who became a close friend. Callow always painted and wrote numerous small-press pamphlets and collections of poetry. Many of his best poems are collected in Testimonies (2000). These echo the qualities of his prose, being superbly crafted with keen observation, vivid language and acute honesty, as in "Holding Back" from Three Poems (2003).
As he walked he was aghast
at the way he had reserved himself
as a young man, labouring at early novels
during years of servitude in offices.
He had held back from his marriage,
from his small daughter
fizzing with life,
even from letters to his late friend,
because what he was doing
in the evenings and at weekends
had taken on an importance
that might mean escape.
Before long he was caught
in the prison
of his egocentricity.
Callow suffered three periods of severe depression, when his first marriage was breaking up in the 1970s, in the early 1990s and, most cripplingly, for the last three and a half years, a time from which his death brought welcome release.
In 2003, I tried to persuade him to let Nottingham Trent University's Trent Editions, which specialises in lost classics, republish The Hosanna Man. He wouldn't have it, not because of the libel issues, but (he eventually told me) because of the novel's naivety. He found it embarrassingly gauche.
Instead he offered me Common People, which shares many of the same qualities. I think his real problem was that revisiting The Hosanna Man was still too painful for him. Reprinting Common People at that time would have been a mistake, as Shoestring Press had just published his brilliant late memoir, Passage From Home (2002). This beautiful book, still in print, covers almost exactly the same ground as his second novel.
Callow was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2004, Nottingham Trent University awarded him an honorary degree, but he was too ill to receive it in person.
David Belbin
An author whose poetic style was born of his Midlands experience
'Words were a snare, a quagmire, a deadly trap," remarks the narrator of Common People (1958), the second novel by Philip Callow, who has died 82. Callow fashioned words into a score of resolutely autobiographical novels and stories as well as substantial biographies of writers and painters who had influenced him - DH Lawrence, Chekhov and Walt Whitman; Van Gogh and Cézanne.
He was born in Stechford, near Birmingham, where his father worked as an upholsterer and clerk. In a self-preoccupied childhood, he wanted solitude - "like my grandfather, which I knew was not very practical. I was too dreamy, even then," he wrote in Common People. With the family's move to Coventry in the 1930s, dreams were "blown to pieces" by the Coventry Gauge and Tool Company, where he became a lathe apprentice in 1939 after studying at the city's technical college.
Callow found solace among painters, while a 1946 production of Chekhov's The Seagull at his old college was a revelation. Decades later, he said: "For the first time I was conscious of experiencing a work of art, a poem that went on blossoming and seemed to exist in its own right, with no visible author." From 1948 he spent three years working as a clerk at the ministries of war and supplies, and thought about writing.
When his novel about a Midlands artist, The Hosanna Man (1956) appeared, he was a clerk for the South West Electricity Board in Plymouth (his parents had retired there). His work presaged such writers as David Storey and Stan Barstow, and was likened to Lawrence (although Callow was also familiar with the work of such notable prewar Birmingham writers as John Hampson and Leslie Halward, and marvelled at William Saroyan). The Hosanna Man was later withdrawn when a Nottingham bookseller claimed the book had libelled him as a pornographer and threatened legal action. But Callow continued with stories with similar settings in Native Ground (1959) and A Pledge for the Earth (1960), dedicated to John Cowper Powys.
After Clipped Wings (1963) came a gap before a trilogy, Going to the Moon (1968), The Bliss Body (1969) and Flesh of the Morning (1971). His prose, though loosened, was no less organised, something he attributed to Dostoevsky, "the model I should have imitated".
Callow finally left the electricity board in 1966 to train in Exeter as a teacher. This led to various teaching positions, including creative writing courses, in the 1970s. His style, always louche, had become even more sexually charged (a tennis player's breasts "bounced up and down inside her cream blouse in a generous, jolly sort of way"). The trilogy's account of other men's women led to the similarly fraught Yours (1972).
His next book, The Story of My Desire (1976), continues the characters from the trilogy with a lacerating view of depression and incarceration when a marriage breaks up (as had Callow's first marriage). During an affair, he wrote, in The Story of My Desire: "The one constant was the Guardian. Lucy had to have her Guardian in the morning, no matter where we found ourselves." She even misses a train for it, and tells him: "You're a rotten Guardian reader. I've got a friend who's great. He always reads out loud the pieces he likes." (The Guardian also figures in one of Callow's many poems, which often resemble scenes from novels.)
Well-worked subject matter and modest sales turned Callow to writing biographies with an excellent, brisk account of young Lawrence in Son and Lover (1975), its sequel appearing three decades on. He later wrote lives of Van Gogh (1990), Whitman (1992), Cézanne (1995) and Chekhov (1998). Highly readable, these evoke worldwide peregrination, but in fact he stayed at home.
Never at financial ease, he returned to fiction with The Painter's Confession (1989), Some Love (1991) and The Magnolia (1994). That this fine author, after looking back in Passage from Home (2002), should have again endured depression brought a sad end to a life whose writing was rooted in an early life which, for too long, had snared him in work ill suited to such a talent.
Callow was an Arts Council writer-in-residence at Sheffield Polytechnic from 1980 to 1986 and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is survived by his second wife, Anne, whom he married in 1987, and the daughter from his first marriage.
Stanley Middleton writes: I first met Philip Callow when we led an Arvon writing course in Yorkshire. I knew his work and had admired it for some time. The Hosanna Man had greatly impressed me. Here was a writer who used his own experience in my own city, and found a simple, eloquent prose style to describe the struggles of a young working-class man to produce novels and paintings. Years later, on his mother's death, he gave me her copy of The Hosanna Man. I knew nothing of the libel difficulties he had suffered on the book's first publication. Philip said nothing to me of this, merely that he hoped I would enjoy it.
Modest in all things, he wrote as one searching for truth, and finally reaching it. Though he knew his mind, he expressed his views with a poetic simplicity, no easy task. He never boasted of his achievements, merely saying what he had set out to do. This quiet use of suitable, apparently unassuming, words was masterly. His accounts of the setbacks and triumphs of a writer had about them a rare, shining ease which carried real weight.
Though he would have been shocked to hear me say as much, there was a saintliness about his work and its expression. It is perhaps this modesty that prevented his books from becoming better known. He was a writer of prose and poetry we could all learn from, and it is to be hoped that it will not be long before some publisher brings out new editions of his books.
· Kenneth Philip Callow, writer, born October 26 1924; died September 22 2007
· This article was amended on Wednesday October 10 2007. Philip Callow was born on October 26 1924, rather than November 25. This has been corrected.
Hosannah Man was Callow's first novel published in 1956. It was withdrawn and pulped when Cape were threatened with a libel suit by a Nottingham book dealer who thought he'd been portrayed. It was never re-printed and is now very rare. There are copies in the British Library however which can be borrowed through your local library. It contains fascinating glimpses of a working class English bohemia
From Chapter 7 of Hosannah Man
At about three on Sunday afternoon I arrived at his house. It was a beautiful spring day. The street was in shadow because of its high buildings. A gang of youths lingered in the road, talking in loud, jeering voices. Then they drifted in different directions, dispersing aimlessly.
The street door was unfastened and slightly open. I called ‘Any-body home?' and started to go in.
There was a low babble of conversation in the back living-room. I heard fragments of heated, angry talk, and then they fell silent, like conspirators, just before I entered the room.
Kelvin had his back to me. He sat on the end of his divan bed, drinking tea. Becker was there again, in the same chair, wearing the same clothes, and with his usual easy grin. It was uncanny, as though nothing had changed and no one had been anywhere since last time.
The other man I had never seen before, so l assumed he was George Meluish. He sat in the armchair I had used before, opposite Becker. I saw at once how thin and impoverished he was. His beard was square and broad, very coarse, trimmed carelessly. It clung to the sides of his face, giving him an unkempt, tramp-like look. He was frowning down at his lap, and this, together with his crouched, roundshouldered way of sitting, made it difficult to tell how old he was. But I thought he was probably no older than Becker, who was thirtyish. I kept looking at his hands. They were badly treated, raw and scarred, with square, splitting nails. They were like tools, crushed and blunted with manual work.
He had a large book on his lap which he was opening and shutting slowly, like a man unable to read, letting the pages flutter down. There was something moving in this, as I looked at him, and I thought of a down-and-out playing with a toy. The book looked incongruous in his workman's hands.
'I'll get another chair,' Becker said lazily. He lounged into the kitchen.
'When I got your note I was almost on my way here,' I said to Kelvin.
'Oh?' He went on drinking his tea. 'That's interesting. You weren't surprised to hear from me, then?' His voice was rather cold and reserved.
'Well, yes. I didn't expect it.' Becker carried in a kitchen chair which had been painted green.
'Like some tea?' he asked.
'Thanks very much.' He nodded and looked around vaguely, his thick lips parted, giving his face a stupid, dreamy expression. Then he lounged off again, slowly and sluggishly.
'Fill the kettle up, Beck,' Kelvin shouted at his back, coming suddenly to life.
Something about him made me want to grin. He looked so neat and dapper sitting there, in newly-pressed worsted trousers and a lemon-yellow shirt. His queer, ugly face poked up strangely out of his bright fresh shirt. It was like a knotted root sticking out of a flower-bed. Looking at him, I thought of a goat decorated with primroses; the wily and cunning dressed in innocence. It looked altogether wrong and comical. He perched there, very much alive, like a renegade canary. He would sing when he was ready, not before.
Becker brought in two cups of tea, one for himself.
He handed me one and winked.
'No sugar,' he drawled. 'You'll get used to it.'
'Why not bring the pot in man?' Kelvin said. 'We don't want to keep going in there. . . . All right, I've got to go out for a wet,' but Becker was half way in the kitchen again.
'Go on, then,' Kelvin said.
He swung up his legs and stretched out on his bed, lying on his back, as if bored with everything. But his eyes were open, staring up at the ceiling, and once his face twitched around the mouth, as though he had been stung.
I had taken him for a big man, but I saw that his legs were thin, and he had small feet.
Becker had come in and placed the brown teapot on the table. Then he sat down, dull and inert.
I glanced over at Meluish, wishing he would speak. I wanted to know more about him, and I was curious about his voice. He still sat motionless, cramped and stiff, still opening the big book with an almost insolent, illiterate action, letting the leaves flutter back with their own weight.
I sat in the room as an intruder, yet I felt strangely indifferent. It didn't matter. I guessed that Meluish had been absorbed in this book before I arrived, perhaps reading aloud from it or discussing it or having an argument about it. Now he was interrupted. 'Perhaps he is waiting for me to go,' I thought, not caring. I sat there obstinately. The note from Kelvin lay in my pocket like a passport. I drank my tea in the lull, gulping it down nervously and hardly noticing what it was. It had been so much diluted with hot water that now it was almost tasteless.
Meluish leaned over and lowered his book to the floor, clumsily. It half-dropped from his fingers. He made a fumbling, scratching attempt to straighten the crumpled dustjacket with his finger-tips, hanging awkwardly out of his chair and grunting. Then he gave it up and lurched to his feet.
'I'm a-goin',' he said dully, in a broad accent. He had gone over to Kelvin's bed.
'Are you, George?' asked the other man, mockingly, squinting up into his face.
'Aye,' Meluish said. He stood there, tall, letting his arms dangle. His bony shoulders seemed permanently stooped, and when he had moved across the room he had hobbled, as though his feet were blistered. It was painful to watch him.
'Elisabeth's comin', you see,' he said thickly. 'She might be theer now .' He jammed his hands into his jacket pockets and stared down, lumpish and wooden.
Kelvin smiled up at him as if amused.
'She might be theer' Meluish repeated, in a louder voice.
And Kelvin laughed.
'Only one way to find out, George,' he said.
His hands were behind his head as he lay there. He was a curious contrast to the other man, who wore a coarse suit made of some dark hairy material and looked like a tramp yet they were both of the same class. They needed few words to communicate with one another; something passed silently between them, beyond their speech. Finally the standing man turned aside as though satisfied.
'Aye,' he said.
He hesitated at the door for a second with his back to all of us.
'So long, then,' he mouthed, childishly, as though he had just learned to talk. Then he hobbled out. He looked in a bad way.
The outside door banged. When Kelvin heard that he suddenly sat up. ‘Where's that bloody teapot?' he muttered, getting up and going to the table.
'What d'you make of him?' he asked me from where he stood, the teapot poised in mid-air.
'I like the look of him.' I was surprised by my own words.
'Where does he live, did you say?'
'Over some stables. The bloke who owns the place had some rubbish in it. George and me cleared it out and fixed it up, and he moved in. If you like we'll pay him a visit one of these days. He pays the owner five bob a week for it out of his dole money. Me, I wouldn't live in the dump if you paid me, I think it's a shocking place. But he says it's better than the Salvation Army, and he can paint all day long up there. D'you know what it is? Just the space between the ceiling and the roof - you have to climb up a ladder through a hole in the floor. I'd say myself it wasn't fit to keep a dog in. There you are, he's up there, like a bloody hermit. Never sees anybody to talk to for weeks at a stretch - that's why he can't speak properly. Bloody fact!
When I first met him he was at a hostel, digging holes in the road for the Corporation. Then he got this craze about wanting to be a painter and went on the dole. Got himself registered as an out-of work artist.' He laughed, and looked across at Becker. 'It's a fact, isn't it?' His friend nodded and smiled.
'I'll tell you something else,' he went on, growing excited.
'D'you know what he comes here for? The real reason?' He paused. He was enjoying himself.
'To read that bleeding book of mine, that's what!' he roared, pointing at it on the floor .
Becker burst out laughing.
'It's true. He's been coming here for weeks reading it. He just parks himself and picks up where he left off last time. It's a text-book on the technique of oil-painting bores me to tears. Technique of the old masters - all that junk. I bought it when I was at the art school. Old George soaks it up like blotting-paper; he can't get enough of it. If I made him a present of it, he'd never show his face near the place again. Once he had that bag of tricks and formulas up his ladder you wouldn't budge him with dynamite. The sod, he'd never come down then! Christ knows what he does with himself, apart from painting. There's a cat he's got now, stinking the place out. . . . It strayed in from somewhere. Maybe he talks to that.' He had got to his feet in his excitement. Now he sat down on the bed again, his eyes darting about. His face was rapt.
'I want to see what he's up to, or I'd give him the damn book,' he went on rapidly. 'He knows a lot about music you wouldn't think it to look at him. A lot, compared to me, anyway. There's a fiddle hanging up on the wall up there, thick with dust. I heard him have a scrape at it once. He can play all right. I think he wanted to be a professional once and started practising about six hours a night after work - went at it like a fanatic. But he's done too many labouring jobs. See his hands? He reckons he wants to paint pictures like Sibelius composes music. Landscapes. That's all he's interested in, landscape and still-life. No figures. He's on to something, I think. Only he's so bloody illiterate, such an ignorant bloke, he can't tell you. He's a fanatic; that's why he's on the wrong track. You can't tell him anything. He'll sit like a lump of wood and look at you. I gave him a pair of shoes once, and an old mac. He takes anything you offer him, carts it up his ladder, but he'll never let you in on what he's thinking.' His speech flooded over me warmly; I felt charged with some of his own energy. His face was tinged slightly with malice and amusement, yet it still had a rapt look. As he spoke, jerking his bright yellow arms at us, he sounded half-angry, half-affectionate. I found myself being drawn to him as to a source of crude life, warming to his vitality, to his comical battlefield of a face.
There was admiration in Becker's large dreamy eyes, when I looked at him, though he must have heard it all before. Being naturally indolent, he was content to sit and look, to be the audience, to admire and nod and encourage.
I could understand that. I wanted to start Kelvin off again myself, to see his face again. And I was curious about a lot of things now.
'Who's Elisabeth?' I said.
'What's that?' Kelvin ducked his face round as he was reaching for a book.
'George said that Elisabeth would be there - before he went out. Who's she - his girl?' He shrugged, keeping his face half-turned away.
'They're getting married. She's German; works at the mental hosp-ital. . . nurse. . . . Bloody fool! He came round here one day -listen to this - and asked me to write a letter for him. He can't write much more than his own name. "Write and tell her I'm breaking off the engagement," he said. "Don't you think that's best?" he asked me, "now I'm going to be a painter?" Probably he'd been reading about one of the old masters or some bloody thing, I don't know, but I agreed that it was the best way. You know me, Beck; I always believe in agreeing with people! I wrote his letter, we sent it straight off, and the next thing I knew, she turned up here and gave me a lecture on his lack of character! "Why couldn't he tell me himself?" she wanted to know. I don't like her, never did; she gives me the creeps somehow- a real house-frau. Never smiles, grim as hell. The sort of woman you can't imagine your-self in bed with. . . . Christ knows what he told her eventually, but there you are; they're getting married. And where d'you think they're going to live? - In that bloody loft of his!’ He stared at me contemptuously, as if I were Meluish.
His face now was open and uncouth, and the common brutality of soldiers and factory workers mixed into his words. He had been in the army. His voice took on a harsh steeliness, a mechanical, meaningless sort of brutality. He fell into the way of it because he had used it so often, and I had heard so much myself that I took it for granted, disregarding it. I guessed that he was using it deliberately now, preferring it to the cultural lisping he must have met with at the art school.
And Becker was uncouth in a different way, more slowmoving and rustic and unassertive. I never heard him swear, though his home was working-class and his father some kind of tradesman.
Being younger I was less brutalized than either of them, so that I made allowances, but not in a superior way. I envied them, and tried instinctively to blunt my sensitivity, to make myself more callous. I envied Becker's rather stupid cheerfulness, and Kelvin's unfeeling single-mindedness, his way of ploughing forward blind and direct.
I found myself imitating them because I wanted them to like me. It seemed important to have their acceptance. If I could, I wanted to have the comradeship of these men.
I liked them. Little things were unimportant. I would submerge the little differences and be like them, I told myself;
I was sick of being isolated. In one way I felt superior, more sensitive, able to create a world out of myself; yet I felt inferior and out of it, less of a man, when we were all together. My strength, I knew, lay in my difference to them, and I should have been proud of this difference. That had always been my way. But it was bad to be so isolated.
Something perverse and dangerous wanted it to remain so, some-thing I half-hated and tried to struggle against. Yet it always won.
Now I had a real chance, I thought. I was among these men, who themselves had a kind of stigma on them, and they were all men of my own class. It was something I had dreamed of.
Bibliography
NOVELS
The Hosanna Man (1956)
Common People (1958)
A Pledge for the Earth (1960)
Clipped Wings
(1964)
Going to the Moon
(1968)
The Bliss Body
(1969)
Flesh of Morning (1971)
Yours (1972)
The Story of My
Desire (1976)
Janine (1977)
The Subway to New York (1979)
The Painter's
Confessions (1989)
Some Love (1991)
The Magnolia
(1994)
Black Rainbow (1999)
SHORT STORIES
Native Ground
(1959)
BIOGRAPHY
Son and Lover: The Young
D.H. Lawrence (1975)
Van Gogh: A Life (1990)
Walt Whitman:
From Noon to Starry Night (1992)
Lost Earth: A Life of Cezanne (1995)
Chekhov: The Hidden Ground (1998)
Louis: A Life of Louis Stevenson (2001)
Body of Truth: DH Lawrence The Nomadic Years 1919-1930 (2003)
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In My Own Land (1966)
Passage from Home (2002)
POETRY
Five New Poems (1959)
Turning Point (1964)
The Real Life
(1959)
Bare Wires (1972)
Homage to the Dancers (1976)
New York Insomnia (1976)
Cave Light (1981)
Woman with a Poet
(1983)
Icons (1987)
Soliloquies of an
Eye (1990)
Notes Over a Chasm (1991)
Fires in October (1994)
Nightshade and
Morning Glory (1998)
Testimonies: New and Selected Poems (2000)
Pastoral (2004)